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Professor May, from Plymouth University, added: ‘Spiders just tick all these boxes, and like any phobia, when it builds up in someone’s mind they can become scared even seeing a picture.

'We like bright- coloured butterflies and ladybirds, but spiders are dark coloured with long angular legs – and the shape and colour both have strong negative associations.

‘We are also very sensitive to seeing things moving out of the corner of our eye and immediately notice it, and insects move quickly and unpredictably.

Many people are also scared of moths for the same reason people are frightened of spiders

Cockroaches also spark fear in many of us because of their quick, unpredictable movements and dark colour

'People scared of spiders will often report them being bigger than they were or say they saw one crawl into someone’s mouth, which spiders never do. We don’t understand their behaviour.’

Professor May said fear is also ‘socially conditioned’, which means we are more likely to develop it as children if we encounter it at home from our parents or siblings.

He added that arachnophobics can deal with their fears by trying to sympathise with the insects and learn about them.

He and Dr Adam Hart, a reader in science communication at the University of Gloucestershire, are holding a public session at Cheltenham Science Festival on Sunday looking at the reasons people fear insects.

Other people have phobias about insects such as moths, beetles and cockroaches.

Dr Hart said small children are happy to handle creepy-crawlies in the garden and find them fascinating, but become scared of them as they get older.

He said the rise of 'nature deficit disorder' - or children spending more and more time indoors and becoming detached from the natural world - may be increasing our fear of insects.

But he said we must find ways to make people like insects more - as we have much to learn from them.

He said: 'There are some insects everyone likes - honeybees, butterflies, ladybirds, but others have a bad reputation, and we wanted to get to the bottom of it.

'Insects are very important to our environment and we can learn a lot from the way they live, for example how ants work together in colonies and solve incredibly complex problems.

'If children are picking up their parents fear of insects, then it will take at least a generation to change attitudes, so we need to work on people of all ages.'

He said one of the ways to learn to appreciate them is to eat them - and he will be cooking a mealworm stir fry for visitors to the festival.